Briefly rehashing what I said in my introductory post to Twine; this online service allows you to gather your data into one place (videos, bookmarks, photos, etc.). From around the web or from your own machine. And with more intelligence and metadata extraction/understanding which makes it easier to organize and find your information. Or discover information of interest to you as there’s a lively bunch of people (and AI) on there already recommending information.

So I’m pleased to announce that I have invitation tickets for interested readers & supporters of Think Artificial. Getting a nice productivity tool ahead of about 40,000 people waiting to get access.

Just a quick notice to those who only read the feeds and not the comments. Last entry was posted on April 1st. And to those who read it and believed it, I hope you forgive me and that you’re comforted by laughter in this last tiny part of the joke — the text hidden in the HTML code, right beneath my signature:

Since early December 2007, a new author has been publishing articles on Think Artificial under my name. This author is not human, but intelligent software created by myself to relieve the pressure of regular posting. Currently, the system has posted over 20 articles without breaking cover.

Taking its cues from Google News Alerts on “robotics”, the system analyzes news articles — identifying and extracting relevant lines of text and generating a shorter version of the article. The text is then paraphrased using preset tunings to mimic my writing style. The ultimate result is an article that only needs my one-click administrator approval to be published.

As Think Artificial grows and garners exposure, there’ve unfortunately been incidents that convinced me that writing community guidelines is a good idea. The following few rules are mainly for new users (if you’ve been commenting here for a while without me bugging you, you can probably skip this.)

Ladies and gentlemen, put your 3D glasses on now. Finally, Think Artificial launches a custom design to go with the content. It took me time to get around to, but better late than never. Tailored to usher in tales from the future, from science fiction to science fact, this metamorphosis echoes ambition for the new year. And oh, does a side-by-side comparison make the last design look prehistoric. A dinosaur, and not the animatronic kind.

Think Artificial will be undergoing a site update today. Some elements are expected to break, and the site will look strange. This post will be edited for news. Apologies for any inconvenience.

UPDATE: Major updating is complete, but work on the site will continue throughout the day. Expect new site features and functionality to pop up over the next few hours; and please be patient with any bugs or quirks — they will be ironed out over the next few days.

UPDATE 2: The recent lack of updates on TA has a reason: In my frenzy of updating I made the time to put together a long-awaited custom design for the site, which in parallel is draining time from writing. The design is well underway and will go live in early January!

The web has certainly been a nice treat. It’s too bad to see it go. The threat of history repeating itself with large multi-billion dollar corporations consuming a new and powerful medium is at our doorstep. This time at the expense of net neutrality. Such a trend’s not an evil conspiracy (not always, anyway), nor is it destined to suffer death-by-monetization. But it’s a threat that’s well worth attention. I received a beta invitation to the Space Collective today, where a nicely put-together video titled ‘Runaway Infrastructure’ caught my attention.

My writings can be found on sites other than this one. Content hunters are invited to read on for discussions about why people think it’s natural for us to have assumed that the Sun went round the Earth — and to view what’s probably the first Powers-of-ten type video, where we zoom from an atomic scale to the edges of galaxies.